Posted on
Monday 24 September 2007

Here are a couple great photos (courtesy of
Joris Robijn)
from the NIWeek 2007 keynote*, which show LabVIEW's response to the
multicore
crisis:

The photo on the left shows two quotes, describing the industry's concern with
the state of parallel software:

"To fully exploit the power of processors working in parallel… new
software must deal with the problem of
concurrency." --Bill Gates, Microsoft

"But a parallel programming model... will not emerge for another 5 to 10
years, according to experts at Microsoft
Corp."
--Rick
Merrit, EE Times

The photo on the right shows a LabVIEW's response: a program running 3.8x
times faster when running on a quad core, as opposed to running on a
single core. This was a very cool demo... they started with a single core
and incrementally enabled each additional core. The speed started at 1x,
then jumped to 1.9x as they enabled the second core, then jumped to 2.9x with
the third, and then jumped to 3.8x with the quad core.

*There is a great
video
of the demo -- in the player, click on Tuesday, August 7th, then
click on the second item: Graphical System Design: Designed, Prototyped, and
Deployed - Tim Denhe 4:00.